Computone grumbling

[Dave Hammond]

In article <122 at jassys.UUCP> tony at jassys.UUCP (Tony Holden) writes:
>When the 2.3 upgrade from SCO arrived I looked thru the docs.  No
>mention of Computone boards.  Growl.  Called Jeff in Tech
>Support at Computone.  Jeff sez "Sorry but the board needs to be
>upgraded, $150 and send me the board".  There's nothing wrong with the
>board.  I don't want it to be upgraded, only to work with SCO 2.3.
>Jeff sez "Some systems with work with the old drivers and some don't.
>Don't know why." [...]

On a recommendation from SCO (several years ago), we went with Emerald
Systems cartridge tape drives, for all our then installed machines.
Emerald supplied their own drivers for 2.1, SCO included Emerald support
in 2.2, but when 2.3 rolled around, the Emerald was still on the supported
list, but it failed to function with 2.3.  After a bit of investigation,
we were left with "... Well, we don't have an Emerald inhouse, so it wasn't
really tested with 2.3.  Since it worked with 2.2, we assumed it worked
in 2.3 ...".  That was back in January, and we have since gone to one
of the Archive-compatible drives on our 2.3 machines.

Last week we got a letter from Emerald Systems, offering a $200 board
and cable upgrade to allow operation under SCO 2.3  (to what was originally
a $1600 product [before tape drives were a commodity]).

>Never again will I consider a Computone product.

Ditto Emerald Systems (this is only the last of a long list of problems
which needn't be aired here).

--
Dave Hammond
daveh at marob.masa.com